William Mercer Green Papers Box 1 Folder 4 Clippings Document 1

Feb. 26, 1887.

central window. He sat thus while the [?] Deum was chanted, and the choir voiced the thought of those who looked upon him, while they uttered the words: "Make them to be numbered with Thy saints in glory everlasting."

His health remained good up to a few days before is death. The last illnss was short and of comparatively little suffering. He took a severe cold, inducing an attack of pneumonia, and the end came swiftly. In the early dawn of Sexagesima Sunday, Feb. 13th, his family were summoned to his bedside. The last change had come suddenly, and the tide of life was rapidly ebbing away. As he waked ffrom sleep and knew that the day was breaking, he fervently uttered his thanksgiving and last morning prayer: "Thank God that He has kept me through the darkness of another night, and brought me to the light of the morning!

Keep me, O keep me, King of Kinds, Under Thine Own almighty wings."

These were among his last words; weary with the weight of nearly eighty-nine years, just as the sun rose on the Lord's Day, he gently "feel on sleep," as an infant goes to its innocent slumbers. "Blessed are the dead who die in the Lord, and blessed are they to whom such good examples are [?] Dear to

much of life, so [?]; how can we who knew hum express out gratitude for each hour of his sweet presence!

The record of the good Bishop's life is one of conscientious faithfulness, but it is only of the closing scnes that we now speak; they were in beautiful accordance with that life, all meekness and peace to the end. As he replied on one occasion to a friend who had wondered how he had borne his many sorrows: "I have just bent like a reed and let them pass over me;" so he seemed to live every day. Always serene, always with a quiet smile upon his face, the gentle calmness of which shed benediction on all about him. Saintly is the word which characterized the atmosphere continually surrounding him and saintly the influence of his words and work.

A touching and prophetic incident occured at "St. Paul's-on-the-mountain,' just one month before his death, when he sat for a time lighted up with an almost supernatural glory in the radiance of color from the stained glass in the chancel. There uppon his silvered head lay the emblem of the cross and crown in golden light which streamed through the